The Iranian theocracy's fear of females

The Veiled Threat

By AZAR NAFISIIssue date: 02.22.99
Post date: 02.04.99

I would like to begin with a painting. It is Edgar Degas's Dancers
Practicing at the Bar, as reproduced in an artbook recently published
in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Under the heading "Spatial Organization,"
the book gives a two-paragraph explanation of Degas's placement of the
ballerinas: "The two major forms are crowded into the upper right quadrant
of the painting, leaving the rest of the canvas as openspace...."

So far, everything seems normal. But, like most things in Iran today, it
is not. Upon closer inspection, there is something disturbingly wrong with
the illustration accompanying this description, something that makes both
the painting and the serious tone of its discussion absurdly unreal: the
ballerinas, you see, have been air-brushed out. Instead, what meet the eye
are an empty space, the floor, the blank wall, and the bar. Like so many
other images of women in Iran, the ballerinas have been censored.

Of course, the irony is that, by removing the dancers, the censors have
succeeded only in making them the focus of our attention. Through their
absence, the dancers are rendered glaringly present. In this way, Degas's
painting is emblematic of a basic paradox of life in Iran, on the eve of
the twentieth anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. On the one hand,
the ruling Islamic regime has succeeded in completely repressing Iranian
women. Women are forbidden to go out in public unless they are covered by
clothing that conceals everything but their hands and faces. At all
government institutions, universities, and airports, there are separate
entrances for women, where they are searched for lipstick and other weapons
of mass destruction. No infraction is too small to escape notice. At the
university where I used to teach, one woman was penalized for "laughter of
a giggling kind." And, just recently, a female professor was expelled
because her wrist had shown from under her sleeve while she was writing on
the blackboard.

Yet, while these measures are meant to render women invisible and powerless,
they are paradoxically making women tremendously visible and powerful. By
attempting to control and shape every aspect of women's lives--and by
staking its legitimacy on the Iranian people's supposed desire for this
control--the regime has unwittingly handed women a powerful weapon: every
private act or gesture in defiance of official rules is now a strong
political statement. Meanwhile, because the regime's extreme regulation of
women's lives necessarily intrudes on the private lives of men as well
(whose every interaction with women is closely governed), the regime has
alienated not just women but many men who initially supported the
revolution.

This tension between the Islamic ruling elite and Iranian society at large
has been vastly underestimated by Western observers of Iran. In part this
is because, over the past 20 years, American analysts and academics, as well
as the Iranian exile community, have had little or no access to Iran. Thus
they have relied unduly on the image presented by Iran's ruling clerics.

At present that image is one of increased openness--as symbolized by the
election of the moderate cleric Mohammed Khatami to the presidency back in
1997. Recently, for example, CNN cheerfully informed us that, after 20 years,
the Islamic Republic has begun to show Hollywood movies. What CNN failed to
mention was that Iranian television's version of, for example, Mary
Poppins showed less than 45 minutes of the actual film. All portions
featuring women dancing or singing were cut out and instead described by an
Iranian narrator. In Popeye, all scenes involving Olive Oyl, whose
person and whose relationship with Popeye are considered lewd, were excised
from the cartoon. Meanwhile, even as the regime purports to have softened
its hostile stance toward the United States, it has not softened the
punishment meted out to Iranians who dare show an interest in American
culture. In fact, soon after he was appointed, Khatami's new education
minister issued a new directive forbidding students to bring material
bearing the Latin alphabet or other "decadent Western symbols" to class.

However, these are just the mildest examples of the many ways in which
the new openness that characterizes Khatami's rule has been accompanied by
increased repression. The brief spring that followed his victory--during
which freedom of speech flourished in public demonstrations and new
newspapers--was brought to an end with an abrupt crackdown. The government
has since banned most of the new papers and harassed or jailed their
editors. (They have since been released.) Many of the progressive clergymen
who took advantage of the opening to protest the current legal system were
also arrested and, in one case, defrocked. The regime has also taken the
opportunity to clamp down on members of Iran's Bahai minority.

Meanwhile, the parliament has passed two of the most reactionary laws on
women in the republic's history. The first requires that all medical
facilities be segregated by sex. The second effectively bans publication of
women's pictures on the cover of magazines as well as any form of writing
that "creates conflict between the sexes and is opposed to the Islamic laws."

This past fall, two nationalist opposition leaders, Daryush and
Parvaneh Forouhar, were murdered, and three prominent writers disappeared.
All three were later found dead. Many Iranians were outraged, and tens of
thousands attended the Forouhars' funeral in a tacit protest. The
government's initial response gave these Iranians some reason for hope.
President Khatami condemned the killings and set up a committee to
investigate them. The committee's first conclusion was that those
responsible were members of the Information Ministry. However, within days,
the committee was proffering a different story, alleging that, on second
thought, the murderers were just part of a rogue group within the ministry
and that the killings were not political. The committee also has yet to
name the killers--much less bring them to justice. Furious, Iranians have
flooded the progressive newspapers with angry calls and letters.

To the extent that the Western media have taken note of such incidents,
they have mainly cast them as the symptoms of a struggle between the
moderate Khatami and his reactionary fellow clerics. More often than not,
the media portray acts of repression as measures taken by the hard-liners
against Khatami--as if he, and not the people who were actually murdered or
oppressed, was the real victim.

This simplistic portrayal of Khatami versus the hard-liners completely
misunderstands the current situation in Iran. Khatami does not represent the
opposition in Iran--and he cannot. True, in order to win a popular mandate
he had to present an agenda for tearing down some of the fundamental pillars
of the Islamic Republic. But in order to even be eligible for election he
had to have impeccable political and religious credentials. In other words,
he had to be, and clearly is, committed to upholding the very ideology his
constituents so vehemently oppose.

Khatami's tenure, then, has revealed the key dilemma facing the Islamic
regime. In order to maintain the people's support, the government must
reform, but it cannot reform without negating itself. The result has been
a kind of chaos, a period marked by the arbitrariness of its events. One
day a new freedom is granted; the next day an old freedom is rescinded.
Both events are symptoms of the deep struggle under way in Iran today, not
just between Khatami and the reactionary clerics, but between the people of
Iran and all representatives of the government. And at the center of this
struggle is the battle over women's rights.

A second image comes to mind--a woman from the past, Dr. Farokhroo Parsa.
Like the ballerinas, her presence is felt through her absence. I try to
conjure her in my mind's eye. Parsa had given up her medical practice to
become the principal of the girls' school in Tehran I attended as a
teenager. Slowly her pudgy, stern face looms before me, just as it did
when she used to stand outside the school inspecting the students as we
entered the building. Her smile was always accompanied by the shadow of a
frown, as if she were afraid that we would take advantage of that smile and
betray the vision she had created for her school. That vision, her life's
goal, was for us, her girls, to be "truly" educated. Under the Shah, Parsa
rose to become one of the first Iranian women to be elected to the Iranian
parliament, and then, in 1968, she became Iran's first female Cabinet
minister, in charge of higher education. In that post Parsa tried not only
to raise the quality of education but to purge the school textbooks of
sexist images of women.

When the Shah was ousted in 1979 by a diverse group of opposition figures
that included Muslim clerics, leftists, and nationalists, Parsa was one of
the many high functionaries of the previous government whom the
revolutionaries summarily tried and executed. At her trial she was charged
with "corruption on earth," "warring against God," and "expansion of
prostitution." She was allowed no defense attorney and was sentenced by
hooded judges.

At the time, the new revolutionary regime took a great deal of pride in its
executions, even advertising them and printing pictures of its victims in
the newspapers afterward. But Parsa's photograph was never published. Even
more exceptional, in that exceptional time, was the manner of her death.
Before being killed she was put in a sack. The only logic behind such an act
could be the claim that Islam forbade a man to touch the body of a woman,
even during her death. There is some debate about the method of her
execution. Some say she was beaten, others that she was stoned, still others
that she was machine-gunned. Nonetheless, the central image of her murder
remains the same: that of a living, breathing woman made shapeless, formless,
in order to preserve the "virtue" and "dignity" of her executioners.

I had not thought of Parsa for many years until the news of her execution
resurrected her in my memory. Since then, time and again, I have tried to
imagine her moment of death. But, while I can see her living face with its
smile and frown, I cannot envision her features at the specific moment when
that smile and frown forever disappeared in that dark sack. Could she have
divined how, not long afterward, her students and her students' students
would also be made shapeless and invisible not in death but in life?

For this, on a broader scale, is precisely what the clerics have done to all
Iranian women. Almost immediately upon seizing power, Ayatollah Khomeini
began taking back women's hard-won rights. He justified his actions by
claiming that he was actually restoring women's dignity and
rescuing them from the degrading and dangerous ideas that been
imposed on them by Western imperialists and their agents, among which
he included the Shah.

In making this claim, the Islamic regime not only robbed Iran's women of
their rights; it robbed them of their history. For the true story of women's
liberation in Iran is not that of an outside imperialist force imposing
alien ideas, or--as even some opponents of the Islamic regime contend--that
of a benevolent Shah bestowing rights upon his passive female subjects. No,
the advent of women's liberation in Iran was the result of a homegrown
struggle on the part of Iranian women themselves for the creation of a
modern nation--a fight that reached back more than a century. At every step
of the way, scores of women, unassuming, without much sense of the magnitude
of their pioneering roles, had created new spaces, the spaces my generation
and I had taken for granted. This is not to say that Iranian women--including
those of my own generation--never made mistakes, never wavered in their
commitment to freedom. But the fact that Iran's women were fallible does not
change the fact that so many of them were vital leaders in Iran's long
struggle for modernization.

Probably the first of these leaders was a poet who lived in the middle of
the last century, a woman named Tahereh who was said to be stunningly
beautiful. At the time, Iran was ruled by the despotic and semi-feudal
Qajar dynasty, whose reign was supported by fundamentalist Muslim clerics.
The alliance between the mullahs and the despotic regime prompted various
groups to begin questioning the basic tenets of Islam. One such group were
the Babis--a dissident movement of Islamic thinkers who were the precursors
to the Bahais--who eventually broke with Islam to create a new religion,
and who are the victims of vicious persecution by the Iranian government to
this day. Tahereh was one of the Babis' most effective leaders. She was
among the first to demand that religion be modernized. She debated her ideas
with men and took the unprecedented step of leaving her husband and children
in order to tour the country preaching her ideas. Tahereh was also the first
woman to unveil publicly. Perhaps not surprisingly, she paid for her views
with her life. In 1852, she was secretly taken to a garden and strangled.
Her body was thrown into a well. She was 36.

As Iran began to have increasing contact with the West, many sectors of the
population--intellectuals, minorities, clerics, and even ordinary
people--became increasingly aware of their nation's backwardness as
compared to the West. From the mid-nineteenth century these forces
continually struggled with Iran's rulers over the degree to which Iran
should close the gap by modernizing itself. By 1908, this struggle had come
to a head, with the ruling Shah threatening to undermine the constitution
that the modernizers had forced his predecessor to agree to accept in 1906.
The new Shah soon began bombarding the parliament.

Once again, women were at the forefront. Many of them actually fought in the
violent skirmishes that ensued, sometimes disguised as men. They even
marched to the parliament, carrying weapons under their veils and, once
inside, demanded that the men holed up there hand over the jobs if they
could not protect the constitution.

The constitutionalists prevailed, and, although the constitution contained
no language advancing women's rights, the next 20 years saw significant
progress in this area thanks to the determined efforts of countless women.
Leafing through the books about the women's movements from this era, one is
amazed at their members' courage and daring. So many names and images crowd
the pages of these books. I pick one at random: Sediqeh Dowlatabadi,
daughter of a learned and religious man from an old and highly respected
family, who was the editor of a monthly journal for women. In the 1910s she
was beaten and detained for three months for establishing a girls' school
in Isfahan. One can only guess the degree of her rage and resentment against
her adversaries by her will, in which she proclaimed: "I will never forgive
women who visit my grave veiled." It was only appropriate that those who
murdered Farokhroo Parsa should also not tolerate Dowlatabadi, even in her
death. In August 1980, Islamic vigilantes demolished her tomb and the tombs
of her father and brother who, although men of religion, had supported her
activities.

It was an American, Morgan Shuster, who best appreciated the efforts of
Iranian women during Dowlatabadi's period. "The Persian women since 1907 had
become almost at a bound the most progressive, not to say radical, in the
world," he wrote in his 1912 book The Strangling of Persia. "That
this statement upsets the ideas of centuries makes no difference. It is the
fact."

As part of their push toward modernization, the women of Iran also supported
a general movement in favor of greater cultural pluralism. Writers and poets
led heated and exciting debates on the need to change the old modes of
artistic and literary expression, with many calling for a "democratization"
of the Persian language. New literary and artistic forms were introduced to
Iran.

The reactionary elements in the clerical ranks and other supporters of
despotism rightly recognized that the ideas in these cultural products
represented a threat to their dominance and immediately attacked them as
"poisonous vapors" coming from the West to destroy the minds of Iranian
youth. To the mullahs the idea of women's rights fell in the same
category--and they opposed them in the same breath. Two prominent clerics,
Sheikh Fazolah Nuri and Sayyid 'Ali Shushtari--mentors of Ayatollah
Khomeini--even issued a fatwa against women's education.

But the charge that Iran's women's rights activists--and the modernizers in
general--were agents of the West is patently unjust. To be sure, they were
keenly interested in bringing in Western ideas. But this desire stemmed
from their acute awareness of Iran's shortcomings and their belief that
Iran's road to independence and prosperity lay in understanding and
internalizing the best of the Western systems of government and thought. It
also meant fighting back when the Western nations began brutally exploiting
Iran's wealth and natural resources. And Iranian women were at the forefront
of this battle--for instance, organizing a large-scale boycott of foreign
textiles in favor of Iranian-manufactured products and frequently
demonstrating in support of national independence. In fact, it is safe to
say that, more than any other group, women, the same women who were several
decades later demonized as the agents of imperialism, symbolized the
nationalistic and anti-imperialist mood of those times.

Over the ensuing years, the modernizers gained ground. Whatever else might
be said about him, Shah Reza Pahlevi, who came to power in 1925, was a
committed modernizer who in 1936 even attempted to mandate that all women
cease wearing veils. When this failed due to popular outrage, he worked to
encourage unveiling in other ways. His son, Shah Muhammad Reza, who was in
power at the time of the 1979 revolution, continued in this tradition--for
example, granting women the right to vote in 1963. (Of course, it should be
remembered that, contrary to the claims of both the Shahs and the clerics
who opposed them, these actions merely ratified the progress that had been
achieved by Iranian women themselves. Long before the mandatory unveiling
law was imposed and long after that law was annulled, scores of Iranian women
chose to throw off their veils of their own volition.)

By 1979, women were active in all areas of life in Iran. The number of girls
attending schools was on the rise. The number of female candidates for the
universities had risen sevenfold during the first half of the 1970s. Women
were encouraged to participate in areas normally closed to them through a
quota system that gave preferential treatment to eligible girls. Women were
scholars, police officers, judges, pilots, and engineers--active in every
field except the clergy. In 1978, 333 of 1,660 candidates for local
councils were women. Twenty-two were elected to the parliament; two to the
Senate. There were one female Cabinet minister, three subCabinet
undersecretaries (including the second-highest ranking officials in the
Ministries of Labor and Mines and Industries), one governor, one ambassador,
and five mayors

That Khomeini ousted them by resorting to the clergy's old tactic of
accusing them of betraying Iranian culture and tradition was not surprising.
What was surprising was that the leftist members of his revolutionary
coalition went along. The leftists had traditionally appeared to support
women's rights. However, this support never ran very deep. The leftists
operated under a totalitarian mindset that was ultimately far more at ease
with the rigid rules espoused by the reactionary clerics than with the
pluralistic approach favored by the women's movement. Thus, when the
Ayatollah began his crackdown, he had the leftists' full support.

Most Iranian women, on the other hand, were not so pliant. Another image
surfaces--this one a photograph that appeared in an American magazine, I
can't remember which. I found it recently among the scraps I had kept from
the early days of the revolution. It was taken on a snowy day in March 1979
and reveals tens of thousands of shouting women massed into one of Tehran's
wide avenues. Their expressions are arresting, but that is not what is most
striking about this photo. No, what draws my attention is how, in contrast
to today's pictures of women in Iran--depressing images of drab figures
cloaked in black cloth--this photograph is filled with color! The women are
dressed in different shades--vibrant reds, bright blues--almost as if they
had purposely tried to make themselves stand out as much as possible. In
fact, perhaps this was their objective, because, on that March day, these
women had gathered to express their resistance to--and their outrage
at--Ayatollah Khomeini's attempt to make them invisible.

Some days prior, the Ayatollah had launched the first phase of his
clampdown on women's rights. First, he had announced the annulment of the
Family Protection Law that had, since 1967, helped women work outside the
home and given them more rights in their marriages. In its place, the
traditional Islamic law, known as Sharia, would apply. In one fell swoop
the Ayatollah had set Iran back nearly a century. Under the new system, the
age of consent for girls has been changed from 18 to nine. Yet no woman no
matter what age can marry for the first time without the consent of her
father, and no married woman can leave the country without her husband's
written and notarized consent. Adultery is punishable by stoning. On the
witness stand it takes the testimony of two women to equal that of one man.
If a Muslim man kills a Muslim woman and is then sentenced to death, her
family must first pay him compensation for his life. As if all this were
not enough, Khomeini also announced the reimposition of the veil--decreeing
that no woman could go to work unless she is fully covered.

The March 8 demonstration began as a commemoration of the International Day
of the Woman. But, as hundreds of women poured into the streets of Tehran,
its character spontaneously changed into a full-fledged protest march against
the new regime's measures. "Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western; it is
global," the women shouted. "Down with the reactionaries! Tyranny in any
form is condemned!"

The March 8 event led to further protests. On the third day, a huge
demonstration took place in front of the Ministry of Justice. Declarations
of support from different associations and organizations were read, and an
eight-point manifesto was issued. Among other things, it called for gender
equality in all areas of public and private life as well as a guarantee of
fundamental freedoms for both men and women. It also demanded that "the
decision over women's clothing, which is determined by custom and the
exigencies of geographical location, should be left to women."

In the face of such widespread protest, the Ayatollah backed down. His
son-in-law emerged to say that Khomeini had merely meant to encourage women
to dress "respectably" in the workplace. But the Ayatollah's retreat proved
only temporary. Even as he was officially relenting on his proclamation on
the veil, his vigilantes continued to attack unveiled women in public--often
by throwing acid at them. And the Ayatollah soon proceeded to reinstate the
veiling laws--this time taking care to move step by step. In the summer of
1980, his regime made the veil mandatory in government offices. Later, it
prohibited women from shopping without a veil. As they had before, many
women resisted and protested these acts. And, once again, they were attacked
and beaten by government goons and denounced by the leftist "progressive"
forces. Later, the veil was made mandatory for all women regardless of their
religion, creed, or nationality. By the early '80s, and after much violence,
the regime had succeeded in making the veil the uniform of all Iranian women.

Yet, even as it enabled the regime to consolidate its control over
every aspect of its subjects' lives, this act firmly established the
separation between the regime and the Iranian population. In order to
implement its new laws, the regime created special vice squads that patrol
the cities on the lookout for any citizen guilty of a "moral offense." The
guards are allowed to raid not just public places but private homes, in
search of alcoholic drinks, "decadent" music or videos, people playing cards,
sexually mixed parties, or unveiled women. Those arrested go to special
courts and jails. The result was that ordinary Iranian citizens--both men
and women--immediately began to feel the presence and intervention of the
state in their most private daily affairs. These officers were not there to
arrest criminals who threatened the lives or safety of the populace; they
were there to control the populace, to take people away, and to flog and
imprison them. Bazaars and shopping malls were surrounded and raided; young
girls and boys were arrested for walking together in the streets, for not
wearing the proper clothing. Nail polish and Reebok shoes were treated as
lethal weapons. Young girls were subjected to virginity tests. Soon, even
people who originally supported the regime began to question it.

The government had claimed that only a handful of "Westernized" women had
opposed its laws, but now, 20 years after the revolution, its most outspoken
and daring opponents are the very children of revolution, many of whom were
the most active members of Islamic students' associations. To cite just one
statistic, of the 802 men and women the vice squads detained in Tehran in
July 1993, 80 percent were under the age of 20. The suppression of culture
in the name of defending against the West's "cultural invasion" and the
attempts at coercive "Islamization" have made these youths almost obsessed
with the culture they are being deprived of.

The regime has also succeeded in alienating many of the traditionalist
women who had initially supported it. Committed religious believers, these
women had long felt uncomfortable with the modernization and secularization
that had taken place in Iran during the century leading up to the
revolution. So, when Ayatollah Khomeini first arrived on the scene, they
welcomed him with open arms. So powerful an ally were they that Khomeini,
who had vehemently protested when women were granted the right to vote in
1963, decided against repealing it so that he could rely on these women's
votes.

After the revolution, these women began to venture into the workplace--which
they now deemed sufficiently hospitable to their traditionalist lifestyle.
There they encountered those secular women who had not been a part of the
Shah's government and who had therefore been allowed to remain in their
jobs so that the regime could benefit from their know-how. As time went by,
the traditionalist women began to find that they actually had quite a lot
in common with their secular counterparts, who they had previously criticized
as Westernized. The line between "us" and "them" gradually blurred.

One issue that solidified this bond was the law. For some traditional women,
the imposition of the veil was an affront to their religiosity--changing
what had been a freely chosen expression of religious faith into a rote act
imposed on them by the state. My grandmother was one such woman. An
intensely religious woman who never parted with her chador, she was
nonetheless outraged at those who had defiled her religion by using violence
to impose their interpretation of it on her grandchildren. "This is not
Islam!" she would insist.

Meanwhile, other traditional women felt alienated by some of the more
draconian aspects of Sharia. The debate around the Islamic laws inevitably
led to a critical reappraisal of the basic tenets that had created them. It
also led to a discussion of more fundamental issues pertaining to the nature
of male-female relations as well as public and private spaces. The regime
had changed the laws, claiming that they were unjust, that they were
products of alien rule and exploitation. Now that the "alien rulers" were
gone, these claims were being tested. Iranian women from all walks of life
were discovering that the biggest affront to them was the law itself. It
did not protect the most basic rights of women; it violated them. As Zahra
Rahnavard, the wife of the last Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Musavi
and an ardent Islamist, has lamented to the Iranian press: "The Islamic
government has lost the war on the hejab [veil].... The Islamic
values have failed to protect women and to win their support."

The incompatibility of these laws with the reality of modern Iran thus
became apparent to the more open-minded elements that had previously
supported the regime. Many of them distanced themselves from the official
policies and joined ranks with those on the "other" side. The
transformation of the editor and part of the staff of an official women's
journal, Zan-e Rooz, is a good example. They left office in the
mid-'80s and created a new magazine, Zanan, sharply critical of many
government policies and practices. They invited secular women to participate
in the publication of their journal. Some from the ranks of clergy joined
them in criticizing the existing laws on women. Such transformations have
frightened the hard-liners into passing even more reactionary laws, further
suppressing the progressive elements working for creation of a civil society
and, in the process, fueling a vicious cycle.

The consequence has been that the regime has become far more dependent on
women for its survival than women are on the regime. The regime can make all
sorts of deals with the imperialist powers, even with the Great Satan
itself, but it cannot allow its women to change the public image imposed on
them: since the regime's legitimacy rests so heavily on the notion that its
rules represent the will of the Iranian people, the presence of even one
unveiled woman in the streets has become more dangerous than the grenades
of an underground opposition. And Iranian women appear to have taken notice.
Young girls in particular have turned the veil into an instrument of protest.
They wear it in attractive and provocative ways. They leave part of their
hair showing from under their scarves or allow colorful clothing to show
underneath their uniforms. They walk in a defiant manner. And in doing so
they have become a constant reminder to the ruling elite that it is fighting
a losing battle.

I would like to end with a final image--this one a joyous one that negates
the other mutilated half-images of women I have described. It happened in
1997, when the Iranian soccer team defeated Australia in the World Cup
qualifying tournament. The government had repeatedly warned against any
secular-style celebrations. But, as soon as the game was over, millions of
Iranians spilled into the streets, dancing and singing to loud music. They
called it the "football revolution." The most striking feature of this
"revolution" was the presence of thousands of women who broke through
police barricades to enter the football stadium, from which they are
normally banned. Some even celebrated by taking off their veils. Time and
again I replay not the actions but the atmosphere of jubilation and
defiance surrounding this event. The Iranian nation, having no political
or national symbols or events to celebrate as its own, chose the most
nonpolitical of all events, soccer, and turned it into a strong political
statement.

As usual, the Western press described these events as a message to the
hard-liners from Khatami's supporters. But the main addressees of the
football revolution's message were not the hardliners; they had heard the
message many times before and had ignored it. If anyone were to learn any
lessons from this event it should have been the more "moderate" faction.
It was clear then, and it has become clearer since thanks to subsequent
demonstrations, protest meetings, and publications, that the majority of
Iranians see the current Islamic regime as the main obstacle to the creation
of a civil society.

It is this problem that faces President Khatami today. He has impressed the
West by proclaiming himself a man who stands for the rule of law. But the
law in the Islamic Republic is what most Iranians today are protesting
against. In reaction the hard-liners have become increasingly repressive;
the small openings and freedoms enjoyed by the Iranian people at the start
of President Khatami's victory have come with arbitrary crackdowns in which
ordinary citizens are stoned for adultery; writers and prominent members of
the opposition are not only jailed but murdered; Bahais are deprived of
their most basic human rights; and the revolutionary guards and morality
police treat the Iranian citizens as strictly as ever.

But these actions are taken from a position of weakness, not strength.
Unlike in the past, repressive measures have failed to quell the protests.
Side by side with the daily struggle that has turned the business of living
into a protracted war, there are public debates, protest meetings, and
demonstrations, reminders of those sunny-snowy days 20 years ago. And,
just as in those days past, women are once again playing a decisive role.

In fact, there is an almost artistic symmetry to the way Iranian
women at the end of the twentieth century, as at its beginning, are at the
center of the larger struggle for the creation of an open and pluralistic
society in Iran. The future twists and turns of this struggle are uncertain,
but of one thing I am sure: a time will come when the Degas ballerinas
return to their rightful place.

AZAR NAFISI, a former professor of English at the University of
Tehran, is currently a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins University
School of Advanced International Studies. She is writing a book on the
subversive role of the Western literary canon in Iran.